Conventional systems for automatically packaging articles produced on a manufacturing line are well known. Individual articles received from the manufacturing line have been counted and arranged into one or more stacks by employing conventional devices. Additionally, conventional devices have been employed to insert the stacks into pre-selected packages, such as cartons or bags.
Various packages of different types of articles have been combined together to provide desired combined-packages. The combined-packages have included articles having different size, different function, and/or different capacity. Additionally, the combined-packages have included different numbers of the various article-types.
During the conventional stacking and packaging operations, however, it has remained difficult to assemble desired combined-packages. For example, it has been difficult to integrate and coordinate a combined-packing operation with an ordinary, preexisting manufacturing line. Where a combined-packaging operation is intended to be temporary, it has been difficult to find an economical system that can be readily added and removed from a preexisting, primary manufacturing operation. If the desired number of a selected article-type is to be gathered from a disorganized, loose collection of such articles, conventional operations have required excessive amounts of manual processing. The typical, manual sorting and stacking operations have been excessively inefficient and costly. As a result, there has been a continuing need for an automated system that can more efficiently stack or otherwise arrange different types of articles, and insert the different article-types into desired combined-packages. There has also been a continuing need for an automated system that can more efficiently rearrange and sort a collection of individual loose articles, and deliver the reorganized articles to an automated co-packaging system.